I’ve been mostly abstaining from using olive oil for the past ~1.5 years. About 10 months or so of that time I was on a 99% strict carnivore diet. More on all that in a later post, but the point is that avoiding olive oil is pretty easy when you’re not eating salad and are tallow/ghee-maxxing for all your cooking needs.

Outside of my carnivorous era, I’ve continued my olive oil abstinence (other than at the occasional restaurant meal). While I probably won’t be eating spinach or kale in copious quantities any time soon, I am cooking a bit more like a normal person these days. That means there are times when I could make use of a liquid-at-room-temp fat like olive oil.

The reason I am not a fan of most olive oils is twofold: first, it is pretty well known now that a ton of the olive oil we see on grocery store shelves is cut with the much cheaper seed oils (which aren’t listed on the label). Before you clutch your pearls, note that this practice of “adulteration” has been around since ancient times (and often with much more harmful adulterants). I’ll do a post some time in the future on the wacky history of adulteration, as it’s pretty fun stuff (sneak peak: there has been a practice in some countries of stealing transformer oil from literal transformers and selling it for deep frying¹).

Second, even if you get a 100% single origin olive oil made from olives hand picked by your Italian grandfather back in Sicily, it will probably still be pretty high in linoleic acid (LA). 

LA is the most prominent of the omega-6 fats in the Standard American Diet^TM, and arguably no single element’s share of our diet has increased as dramatically as that of LA over the last 50-100 years, the same period over which chronic disease has skyrocketed. Most health-minded normies stay away from seed oils (which are loaded with evolutionarily inconsistent megadoses of LA) because of 1) the vile process in which they are manufactured, and 2) the “rancidity upon consumption” argument (i.e., that the oils are partially oxidized before you even consume them). So they’re avoiding LA but not for the sake of avoiding LA (remember: LA = linoleic acid. They may, however, for health reasons, also be avoiding Los Angeles). 

I think the issues with seed oils do boil down mostly to LA and its toxic metabolites, as well as the way the omega-6 fats impact energy production in our mitochondria. I’ve been convinced on these two points by the work of Tucker Goodrich (https://tuckergoodrich.substack.com/) and Peter Dobromylskyj (https://high-fat-nutrition.blogspot.com/ – see the “Protons” thread of posts), respectively.

That is all to say that even the finest olive oils can have up to 20% linoleic acid, which is basically canola oil levels. Yikes. Well, I dug into it a bit more recently, and found that there’s actually quite a range of linoleic acid levels, depending largely on the specific olive varietal and the time of harvest. Picual olives, a Spanish variety, are the lowest, around 2-5% LA^2,3. The LA content in olives also increases steadily throughout the season, so the earlier the harvest, the better⁴. Combine these two factors with an early harvest, 100% Picual olive oil and things are looking pretty good.

I found a reputable producer, Oro Bailen, that sells a 100% early harvest Picual olive oil⁵. I also like that its acidity is 0.11%. Acidity, with respect to olive oils, has nothing to do with taste. It’s a lab measure of the amount of free fatty acids (FFAs) in the oil, relative to the amount of oleic acid (the most prominent monounsaturated fat in olive oil). 

A little biochem 101: fats are normally stored as triglycerides, consisting of 3 FFAs bound to a glycerol backbone. 

Enzymatic activity can cleave the FFAs off of the glycerol molecule, which would cause that lab-measured acidity to go up. This cleavage occurs through hydrolysis (hydro = water, lysis = breaking), so exposure to moisture can promote it. The enzymes responsible for this process, which might come from the olive itself or from exposure to microbes, become more active when the olives are damaged or overripe. All in all, high FFAs in an olive oil are a sign of poor storage conditions of the olives before or during pressing. This is sort of another principle component of olive oil quality (the first, for me, being the LA percentage). To be called “extra virgin”, an olive oil must have an acidity of <0.8%, as dictated by the International Olive Council⁶. More than that, and it’s just “virgin”. Less than 0.3% is considered excellent, so the aforementioned 0.11% is award-winning level.

Anyway, I shelled out the $10 shipping fee (which goes against my fundamental philosophy) for that olive oil, so I’ll report back on my thoughts on it. Though I’m less concerned with taste than I am with these other quality metrics, I am hoping it tastes pretty good too.

1. https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2014/12/28/thieves-fry-kenyas-power-grid-for-fast-food/ ↩︎
2. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19601663/
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3. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/plant-science/articles/10.3389/fpls.2021.653997/full
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4. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S030442381830092X
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5. Not sponsored, but if anyone wants to send me free olive oil, I’m down (as long as it’s low LA) ↩︎
6. https://www.internationaloliveoil.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/COI-T15-NC3-REV-16-2021-_ENG.pdf
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